Abstract Special features in real marine environments such as cloud clutter, sea glint and weather conditions always result in various kinds of interference in optical images, which make it very difficult for unmanned surface vehicles USVs to detect the sea-sky line SSL accurately. To solve this problem a saliency-based SSL detection method is proposed. Through the computation of gradient saliency the line features of SSL are enhanced effectively, while other interference factors are relatively suppressed, and line support regions are obtained by a region growing method on gradient orientation. The SSL identification is achieved according to region contrast, line segment length and orientation features, and optimal state estimation of SSL detection is implemented by introducing a cubature Kalman filter CKF. In the end, the proposed method is tested on a benchmark dataset from the -XL- USV in a real marine environment, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is significantly superior to other state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy rate and real-time performance, and its accuracy and stability are effectively improved by the CKF. View Full-Text